Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 32.djvu/160

124 124 HARVARD LAW REVIEW "... to Bonaparte's presence we may ascribe the fact that the civil law of France was codified, not only with more scrupulosity than other portions of French law, but also with a livelier sense of the general in- terests of the State. What those interests were, Bonaparte knew. They were civil equality, healthy family life, secure bulwarks to property, religious toleration, a government raised above the howls of faction. This is the pohcy which he stamped upon the Civil Code." We have, too, the testimony of an eye-witness, Thibaudeau, as to the ease with which he maintained his positions in debates with men who had made law a lifelong study. Another has said : "On some points his influence may seem to have been unfortunate. But how small a price for the rest ? His all-powerful will was the lever removing all obstacles. His energy and (why ignore it?) his ambition were the instruments to which we owe the achievement of the great task, — a task which had been unfulfilled for centuries, and, but for him, might still in our own day have remained undone." ^ Yet Napoleon, though the son of a lawyer, never took a law course; his training was only at a military school; and he had a hearty dislike for the noblesse de la robe, as the bar is called in •France, though he never allowed this feeling to deprive the country of needed professional talent. How did he learn his law? Simply by utilizing all his odd moments. Once, while a lieutenant, he committed some trivial ojffense and was confined for several days in the guardhouse. The room contained a Latin copy of Justinian's Digest, which Napoleon's intensely active mind seized upon, and, through his prodigious memory, absorbed.*^ When presiding over the deliberations of the Council upon the draft code he was always quoting the Digest, and the members were asking each other: WTiere did the First Consul get his knowledge of Roman law? They might have found the answer in the poet's words: "The heights by great men reached and kept Were not attained by sudden flight; But they, while their companions slept, Were toiling upward through the night." How applicable this to one who did a giant's work, sleeping only four or five hours out of twenty-four.
 * I Continental Legal History Series, 289.
 * » Wells, Things Not Generally Known, 105.